Lightweight and Customized Design via Conformal Parametric Lattice Driven by Stress Fields

Additive manufacturing has opened up new opportunities for material-based design and optimization, with lattice materials being a key area of interest. Lattice materials can exhibit superb physical properties, such as high thermal conductivity and excellent energy absorption, and be designed to meet specific design objectives. However, optimizing the use of these materials requires considering geometric constraints and loading conditions. This research explores stress-driven multi-agent system (MAS) to achieve high-performance lattice infilling. The von Mises stress and principal stress are investigated as the infilling environments as they are typical failure evaluation criteria. The feasibility of these approaches is demonstrated through a case study of sport helmet design, where MAS is used to generate conformal lattice structures that meet functional and fabrication requirements. The density distribution and arrangement direction of lattice units are effectively controlled in physical fields. The results demonstrate that both von Mises stress field and principal stress field-driven methods can improve the stiffness of helmets compared to the method that only considers geometrical conformity under the same mass. The paper concludes that stress-driven lattice infilling has the potential to revolutionize material-based design and optimization in additive manufacturing.